His mother speaks:
"Christmas is beautiful, but for me it's just another day because I'm alone with him. Massimo is sad because his father left us two years ago.
I can't talk to him the way his father did. Massimo waits to see him appear suddenly, the way he used to, to cuddle him: 'Hey Dad, you've got blue eyes!' Massimo would laugh and wait for him to do it again and again, to make him laugh with his jokes.Now I look at his photograph above Massimo's big wheelchair, and I find myself saying to him: 'You take care of it! Pray to the Lord that he gives me the strength to care for him in the future.'
I've found good help, because alone, with the aches of old age, I couldn't manage. They're a couple from Ecuador; they live here with us, they're affectionate, they try to be close to us... but at Christmas maybe they'll go to lunch with a sister.
So the two of us will wait for a visitor that beautiful day, who knows — a nephew, a friend from Fede e Luce, maybe. You see, my relatives my age are all in heaven now. I'm the only one left. I entrust myself to the Lord, I tell him always, whatever you wish."
Massimo is 41 years old, his mother Rossana is 71. I see them again, as if in a film—the three of them, bound together by this great, exclusive love for their son: they present him as a treasure, they interpret the sounds that accompany his deep, mysterious laughter. They know when he's tired, when he's hungry or thirsty; they are moved when he grows excited because someone is singing a song he loves.
When Rossana goes shopping and Massimo becomes restless, the cashier takes him in hand, wheels him away from the store with all its stimulating goods, and heads toward the ramp that leads to a nearby church. She knows by now—she's heard it from his mother enough times—that Massimo has a special gift for entering a church, for sitting in the silence of that mystery, for contemplating in a way that he understands better than any of us.
Rossana joked with me one day: "If things had been different, my son would have been a priest!" Certainly Massimo has proclaimed in his family that Love which his devoted parents lived fully with him and for him.
Will someone visit him at Christmas, he who has grown a little sadder since his father is no longer here; will someone spend time talking with his courageous mother, for whom Christmas ought not to be just another day?